by Jeff Vrolyks
Chapter Seven
Mae walked the three blocks from the bus stop home, which was an upper-middle class two-story home on a shady street with huge properties. The kind of neighborhood where locking the door was something you did out of habit, not out of necessity. She was still getting used to calling this home, this being her uncle Matthew’s house. Her parents David and Rebecca had been buried two months now, their killer the SacTown Slayer still at large. A serial killer with a tally of nine murders, her parents numbers seven and eight.
Her uncle Matthew had been a bachelor for three years now, had divorced Mae’s Aunt Denise for reasons he didn’t like to talk about, but she knew it had something to do with an affair, only she didn’t know who was the guilty party—she suspected Aunt Denise. Uncle Matthew hadn’t dated since the divorce, claimed to work too much to date. She hoped he’d meet someone soon, so he’d be less involved with her life. She had offered to create an eHarmony profile for him, but to no avail.
Uncle Matthew still treated Mae as a victim, his sympathies great with no sign of letting up. His eyes were in a perpetual state of apology toward Mae, and he touched her often with a gentle hand on her shoulder or back, usually while offering to make her something to eat, or for some cash to go to a movie or a ride to her friend Lisa’s house if she wanted the companionship of a friend. Mae loved him but it pained her to see him, as he resembled her mother too greatly. They had the same eyes, same nose, and even their smiles were similar.
He was a doctor at Saint John’s Memorial Hospital, a general practitioner, and worked long hours; his days off usually Wednesday and Thursday, but he worked even then if they were understaffed or busy, which was often the case. He worked the evening shift during the weekdays, the morning shift on the weekends, and regretted that the hours Mae was typically home Matthew was not. He’d get to spend a little time with her in the dark hours of the weekends (assuming she wasn’t out with her boyfriend Trent), and always spent an hour with her in the mornings before she headed off for school. He’d cook her breakfast and employ the same sympathies as he did, making comfort foods such as biscuits and gravy and scrambled eggs, blueberry pancakes and hash browns. Mae judged she’d gain twenty pounds this first year if he continued cooking these rich breakfasts.
Being that it was Saturday morning, the house was vacant when she returned home from Millie’s. On the bus ride home she had gotten a text from Trent: he was on his way to her house to visit before his intramural baseball game at noon. She looked forward to it, she had replied, and really did. A more profound juxtaposition between Trent and Uncle Matthew there was none. Trent wasn’t sympathetic toward her. Not even in the wake of her parents’ deaths. Mae would have guessed his seeming indifference toward the tragedy would have offended her, but it did quite the opposite. She had spent enough time crying over their memory. She needed a distraction—cherish their memory, but find reasons to enjoy life once again. Uncle Matthew sure didn’t offer a distraction. One look in his pitiful eyes sparked recollection of the double-homicide and it was all she could do to keep from crying all over again. But with Trent the tragedy never happened. Well, it happened but he treated it like it was something he read in a newspaper article: “Aww, isn’t that just horrible? Poor couple. Could you pass the jam, sweetheart?” He was more of a look-to-the-future kind of guy, not reflect-on-the-past type. Spending time with him set her mind to rights, lightened her heavy heart if only for a while.
Trent rented an apartment in Roseville, some thirty minutes from Matthew’s. He had been suggesting to Mae since the tragedy that she should move in with him. She liked the idea but it simply couldn’t happen. Uncle Matthew was her guardian now, and he wouldn’t allow his fifteen-year-old niece to live with her eighteen-year-old boyfriend. He disapproved of the relationship entirely, but hadn’t yet made an attempt at dissolving it, because to do so would hurt Mae, and that wasn’t an option. He knew they had been having sex, because his sister Rebecca had told him as much before the tragedy. He’d love to bust Trent for statutory rape, but again, that would hurt Mae.
When Mae asked her uncle if she could move in with her boyfriend, she was denied on the premise of her school being here in Sacramento, and Matthew gingerly added that she was too young to live with a boyfriend, no matter how much they professed to be in love with one another. She’d only have to wait three years, he had consoled her, and then she’d be a high school graduate and adult, could live with her beloved Trent for the rest of her sweet life, if she so chooses. She understood his position and thought if she were in his shoes she’d probably say the same thing. But since it was her own shoes she was in and Trent was the world to her, she argued the decision. She didn’t have a say in the matter, being that he was her guardian, so it didn’t really matter. Trent had said he’d talk to Matthew one of these days, to get him to see that what was best for Mae was her living with him, and that Roseville high schools were superior to Sacramento’s (maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t), and it would benefit her in every conceivable way. That day hadn’t yet come, but it neared.
Mae went straight to the couch, snatched the remote control from the coffee table and powered on the TV, quickly found the news. As she suspected, the news still centered on the latest attack from the SacTown Slayer: a middle-aged man by the name of Scott Thatcher, who was found dead by his concerned son two days (coroners determined) after his execution. He had been banded to a chair by duct-tape, his throat rent open by a large knife, and bled out. The story wracked Mae’s heart, as it was the same means of death her parents had suffered. She was compelled to learn the story and its grisly details, and every story concerning the serial killer. She somehow felt she owed it to her parents to keep up on events, that perhaps her involvement (silent and inactive as it was) would honor their memory. Mr. Thatcher’s death marked the ninth victim. Would there be more victims before he was caught? The stolid spokesman for the Sacramento Police Department seemed to think not. He extenuated their incompetence in catching him, then enumerated the courses of action they pursued to prevent there being a tenth victim, none of which inspired hope in Mae.
Would the next attack be merely victim-number-ten? Or might the headlines read something like: VICTIMS NUMBER TEN AND ELEVEN FOUND SLAIN. A two-fer. Maybe there’d be a three-fer or more. Why not? The guy was obviously working on depopulating Sacramento and wouldn’t stop at a paltry nine slain. If the cops continued their ineptitude, it was reasonable to think even they might account for some of the slain. Hell, if the serial killer offed the guys hunting him, wouldn’t it make life all the easier on him? These were the dark thoughts whirling in Mae’s mind as warm tears trickled down her cheeks, watching the grim broadcast but hearing very little of it. Mingled with her sorrow was anger. Anger toward the city for not having caught this asshole yet. At least put a teary-eyed sympathetic spokesman in front of the damned camera, is that too much to ask? Not a complacent motherfucker regurgitating the same stale excuses and false hope.
When she heard the door of Trent’s Audi close in the driveway, she changed the channel and wiped her tears away. Trent didn’t approve of her following the news stories of the SacTown Slayer, said they would only inflame her despair. She supposed he was right, as he usually was. It didn’t mean she’d stop following the stories, it only meant she’d dwell on them less, and never let Trent catch her watching special news broadcasts. ‘We interrupt this program to bring you breaking news’ was always broken a second time by Trent changing the channel—often a few times before he found a channel without a news team.
Her cellphone rang. The screen read Private Caller. She got off the couch to head for the door while answering it.
“Hello?”
“Mae! Mae, Mae, Mae!” The caller said excitedly.
“Yes, who is this?”
“Guess,” the caller baited. His excitement was manifest.
Mae arrived at the front door and didn’t unlock it just yet. She looked out the peep-hole and didn’t see Trent
.
“I have no idea.”
“I’ll give you a hint.” The caller began singing the nursery rhyme Oh My Darlin’ Clementine.
Mae gasped and dropped the phone. It smacked the wooden foyer floor loudly. She picked it up and reached to the deadbolt, and instead of unlocking it, she made sure it was locked fully, and retreated out of the foyer into the kitchen.
“It can’t be,” she whispered into the phone.
“I’m so sorry for all of this. Sorry doesn’t begin to express how—”
“Breuer? It can’t be!”
The front door tried to open, the knob rattled. The doorbell rang.
“Ah, I see you have company,” said the caller. “It’s Trent, and he has a present for you. A box of chocolates.”
“If you’re Breuer, and you’re real, show yourself to me right now.”
He sighed into the phone. “I can’t. Not anymore. I told you—”
The doorbell rang again, followed by loud sharp knocks.
“You aren’t real,” she said decidedly.
“Not… not real?” the caller said with hurt feelings. “Honey, how could you say that to me?”
Being that he wasn’t real, she didn’t feel it was necessary to say goodbye when she slid the cellphone in her jeans pocket. She went to the door feeling rather numb from the shock of it all, and let Trent in. Her eyes doubled when she saw the box of chocolates in his hand. He was smiling at her, but the smile lessened when he perceived her distress, the lines around her bright eyes, her creased brow. He imperiously stepped inside, jostled past her and entered the living room, checked the TV. It was some ludicrous game show, not the news. He pressed Previous on the remote and the news was on-location at a murder scene.
“I hope you weren’t watching the news, Mae.”
She began weeping silently, at both his tone and the memory of the subject matter on the news.
“So you were watching it. What did I say about that? You don’t need to scare yourself needlessly, or remember things you’re better off forgetting.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
He handed her the chocolates and said, “Got you a little something. I know you love Sees.” He studied her sorrowful countenance and sought to console her. He raked her walnut brown hair behind an ear and caressed the nape of her neck. “Mae, sweetheart, you’re safe with me. The SacTown Slayer will be caught soon enough. You have nothing to fear, so long as you’re with me. Okay?”
She nodded, wiped her tears. “I’m not afraid of him.”
His cold gray eyes penetrated her own, fishing for truths that she wouldn’t openly confess. “What happened,” he said accusatorily.
“Nothing.”
He took her by the hand to the couch, sat down and said, “What did I tell you about lying to me? I know when you’re lying. What happened and don’t you dare lie to me.”
“Remember what I told you about my imaginary friend?”
“Breuer,” he said disdainfully and rolled his eyes.
She nodded.
“You’re seeing him again?”
Trent reflected to when he last fed her a pink pill. It was last night, broken into small pieces and stuffed into the sausage pieces of their take-out pizza. “I’ll go with you to pick up the pizza,” she had said. “No, honey, I’ll get it alone. Be back soon.” There were days when he simply didn’t have an opportunity to feed her a pill, but generally she took a dose a day—obliviously, of course. That she might be seeing Breuer again was troubling as hell. Mae was his little angel. His slice of heaven, of perfection. Mental illness didn’t fit into that picture anywhere. That’s what the pills were for, to take the mental illness out of the picture. Maybe he needed to up the dosage. What a bitch that would be, to not only sneak her a pill a day but two. He had enough pills to last another month (at one pill a day), then he’d need to drive to Mexico to buy more, and it was hell acquiring them in Mexicanville. Only one place had them, and only because Trent had requested them in advance and paid upfront with a promise to be a regular customer. What a pain in the ass that was going to be, to need twice as many. Things weren’t cheap, either. Maybe it would be worth it to take Mae to the head-doctor and get the pills prescribed directly, legally, and paid for by her insurance. But after his and Mae’s big discussion…? After Trent vehemently opposed her parents forcing crazy-pills down her throat, assuring her that she was anything but insane, that they were insane for thinking their daughter needed lithium…? To do a one-eighty and tell Mae she’d better take the pills because she was indeed nuttier than a fruitcake? He wasn’t so sure he could do that. He was the rock foundation that Mae built upon. A resolute man firm in his convictions and actions. He wasn’t a waffler, so rarely changed his mind, so adamantly didn’t want to appear as having been wrong about the medicine all along. But… but he’d do what he had to do, that was the bottom line. Even if it meant secretly feeding her not one pill but two pills a day for the rest of her life, he’d do it. He planned on being a psychiatrist one day (God willing) and then getting the crazy pills would be simple, and being that she would be living with him, feeding her the pills would be a breeze. He’d have to give the subject the breadth of thought it warranted at a later time. He made a quick mental note: Up Mae’s dosage???
“No I didn’t see him,” she said noncommittally. “But… but I just spoke with him on the phone.”
Trent exhaled loudly. Every time he did that she cringed internally.
Before he could reprimand her, and with her hands out gesturing to punctuate her words, she said, “Trent, I know it didn’t happen. I know it. It’s all in my head, you don’t need to remind me. I’m sorry, I really am. I’m not hallucinating, though. Are you mad?”
“Babe,” he said and sighed, slumped his shoulders, “I can’t be mad at you for something that’s not your fault. It’s not like you’re asking to see him, or hear a phone call that never happened, right?” She nodded and chanced a grin; a tear rolled down her cheek. He patted her hip, felt a cellphone. “Let me see your phone.”
She produced the phone and he took it. He went to recent calls and widened his eyes at what he found: Private Caller: 10:46AM – 10:47AM. It was only a couple minutes ago.
“Who was this?” Trent demanded.
“Like I said, it was Breuer. Or at least he insinuated that it was. The voice was a little different from what I remember.” At least she thought it was. Funny how that works. Breuer had been a part of her life for four years, his voice she had heard innumerable times. Yet here it was a few months after she had stopped imagining him and the voice that was once so recognizable that it might as well have been her own, was now uncertain. The recent voice on the phone, it was deeper, she thought.
“But he doesn’t exist, which means you spoke to someone else. Who, Mae? Who!”
She fixed on one gray eye, then the other, back and forth. Her lips parted as though she wanted to say something, but didn’t. Couldn’t.
Trent returned her phone, put his hand on hers to comfort her. ‘Nice Trent’ had returned, abruptly. But ‘nice Trent’ was just a mask over the real Trent. At least when he was angry he was a known quantity. ‘Nice Trent’ was always a wild card.
“It’s okay, baby,” he said. “It’s nothing, really. Let’s forget that it happened. That’s the first time you’ve seen or heard him since we’ve been dating, right?”
“Yes. I swear on my soul, it is.”
“Good.” Trent opened the box of chocolates and pinched out a specially-chosen candy and fed it to her. She smiled appreciatively and allowed it into her mouth. He watched her as she chewed it a few times before swallowing. “One more,” he said and pinched another out, fed it to her. If she could have seen the undersides of the candies she’d have found holes where a half a pill was stuffed inside those two particular candies.
She frowned. “That one was a little bitter; a tangy nut in it.”
“They can’t all be good. Hey listen, I have a game in an hour. Want
to come watch?”
“Always.”